2010-07-26

fitting a curve to stars

Tsalmantza and I continued with binary quasar inspection. Myers, Hennawi and I discussed Pan-STARRS calibration with Eric Morganson (MPIA). On a related note, at the weekly MPIA Pan-STARRS meeting, Cristina Afonso (MPIA) showed that Pan-STARRS data are very stable and can be calibrated to sub-percent precision when there are many overlapping epochs. Kasper Schmidt (MPIA), Rix, and I discussed quasar variability, and I worked out a few things we can do to model it more flexibly.

Most importantly, however, Jagannath showed up in Heidelberg for a week, and we discussed our project of fitting orbits to streams of stars at lunch with Rix. He made some suggestions—in particular to consider the effect of systematic distance errors—which slightly adjusted our to-do list; we are on track to finish a zeroth order document by the end of the week.